SCORECARD
THE BORDER RAIDERS
Recently Canada managed to work out with U.S. colleges a quota program whereby only two Canadians may play on any one U.S. college hockey team. (Schools like Michigan, which has 13 Canadians on its roster, will be allowed time to work down to the quota.) Now it appears that the U.S. itself may be in for a bit of hockey raiding from Mexico.
Gomez Haro, who runs an ice rink in Mexico City, has arranged to import 15 young hockey players from Chicago. They will continue their studies there and at the same time teach Mexican boys how to play. Three Americans will be assigned to each of five hockey teams and serve as a nucleus for the development of the game in a country which, until recently, knew little about ice, let alone playing games on it.
SENSE OF PURPOSE
In late winter and early spring most football seniors of last fall find little to occupy them but their books while former teammates are busy with spring practice. The situation is not so placid for Negro seniors in these days of civil-rights crises. Last week two of the 1964 season's better players took part in demonstrations.
Roy Jefferson, who played end for the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, led a group to the headquarters of the Mormon Church to protest what they termed reluctance of officials of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to support civil-rights legislation in the Utah legislature.
Gale Sayers, Kansas halfback and now the valuable property of the Chicago Bears, was arrested for sitting in the hallway of the chancellor's office in a protest against the quality of housing the university provides Negroes. He and 109 others were suspended from school, but the suspensions were lifted quickly.
The seven Negro undergraduate football players who joined Sayers outside the chancellor's office were chided by Coach Jack Mitchell.
"This is interfering with football," he told them, "and not what you came to college for."
Obviously, they came to college to play football.
GOODBY TO FRANK
One of the gentlest and most beloved of sportswriters, Frank Graham of the New York Journal—American died in his sleep last week at the age of 71. And so a sadness settled over every spring training camp and in boxers' grimy gyms and in the stables of the big racetracks. These were the sports Frank Graham loved and wrote about so well. Those who took part in them returned his affection, without exception. For, as Jimmy Breslin of the New York Herald Tribune put it: "The guy was kind of a church of his own."
DISASTER AT OCU
On their way to Provo, Utah for the NCAA basketball regionals, Coach Abe Lemons and his Oklahoma City University team lost a few players. Two were graduated, two flunked out and one broke an ankle. Even the student manager flunked out. "That's the only student manager I ever lost through ineligibility," said Abe.
That left OCU with only seven players, and two of these never get into games anyway. Abe turned for reinforcements to an unlikely source, the student body. He found Perry Hill, 6 feet 6, who never had played basketball in his life. Hill went to Utah with the team.
"We needed him," Abe explained, "because we had to have enough to form two lines for our warmup drills."
HARD WAY RECORD
The acknowledged master of carp fishermen in England, where the carp is respected, is Peter Hemingway, a fireman who quit a good job as manager of a tackle shop because fire fighting gave him more time for fishing. Now he is being inundated with letters from other English anglers asking for his "secret."
Hemingway's only secret is that he has been spending night after freezing night lying on a camp bed by the River Nene in the middle of Peterborough. "It's the most miserable place Eve ever fished," says Hemingway, but the catch—rather than a bucolic, Waltonian background—is what he finds important. Last month, after 1,200 angler-hours, Hemingway's single-mindedness was rewarded when he landed a 33-pound 12-ounce carp, equal to the biggest ever taken in Britain.
Normally, there is no more chance of catching a big carp in the depth of winter than picking strawberries. But where Hemingway fishes, the warm-water effluent from an electric power station convinces the fish that it is June in January. This one, taken on nine-pound test line, accepted a piece of boiled potato as bait.
Hemingway is not resting on his laurels. He is back fishing nightly, his eye on the all-waters record of 55 pounds 5 ounces, set at Clearwater Lake, Minn. in 1952.
SPORTING LOOK-REAR VIEW
Back in the early 1950s the Massachusetts legislature put in a constructive day passing a bill that allowed Rocky Marciano, then heavyweight champion, to adorn his automobile with the license plate KO-1. Since then the practice has been epidemic.
The latest to get a vanity plate for his car is Tony Conigliaro, Red Sox outfielder, who chose his initials. Members of the Boston Celtics basketball team have numbers that correspond with their jersey numerals. Thus, Bill Russell is C-6 and, until he retired, Bob Cousy was C-14. When he took over as coach at Boston College, Cousy had his two cars registered. They are BC-1 and BC-2. In 1961 a bill was passed that gave Eddie Shore, former defenseman for the Bruins and member of the Hockey Hall of Fame, the right to display a plate that reads MR. HOCKEY. Paul Pender, former middleweight champion, has M-CHAMP on his plate and Tony DeMarco, former welterweight champion, has TKO. When Joe Cronin became president of the American League his plate was changed to read PAL.
One of the few athletes to turn down an offer of a vanity plate was, predictably, Ted Williams.
"No, thanks," said the former Red Sox slugger. "I like things the way they are."
We suggest that the plate CLOWN be reserved for the next member of the Massachusetts legislature to introduce such a bill.
BROOM BOOM
Canada's 500,000 curlers (SI, March 15) will have bought almost a curling broom apiece by the end of this year, according to Canadian broom manufacturers, who are anticipating their most successful season in the game's history. Exports are up, too. The manufacturers will sell record numbers in the northern U.S. (60,000 brooms were shipped across the border last year) and thousands more to Norway, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden and even Italy and New Zealand.
One of the larger manufacturers, the Curl Master Co., reports that its sales are running 42% ahead of last year. To some extent this reflects an increase in the number of players, but there are other factors, among them increased exports and the fact that more eastern Canadians are buying their own brooms instead of renting them. They retail at $5.95 apiece.
Brooms very like the ordinary household variety were used until 1956, when Fern Marchessault, a manufacturer, produced his specially designed Curl Master and added such models as the Little Beaver and the Black Jack, each with its peculiarities. The Black Jack, for instance, has a plastic or leather tongue fitted into the straws and some of the straws are inserted upside down. It hits the ice harder, curlers say, and thus melts it faster. According to Marchessault, it exerts "25% more pulling power" on the stone, whose speed and direction it is intended to control. Unfortunately, it makes a loud crack each time it hits the ice, and some clubs have barred it.
Naturally, Japan tried to get into the broom market. It shipped some of its own make to Canada, but Canadians declared them inferior and the Japanese quietly withdrew.
TAR-BABY REVISITED
As we dimly recall, Uncle Remus invented the plot, the characters and the denouement.
There they were, 18 members and 32 hounds of the 250-year-old Barlow Hunt, riding wildly across the countryside of South Yorkshire and Derbyshire in full pursuit of a fox. They were closing in fast near the village of Killamarsh when the fox was seen to slow down. Carefully, he picked his way through what appeared to be a large puddle of shallow water. He got through it and resumed speed. But he turned his head back just long enough to observe the hounds floundering in hundreds of gallons of thick waste tar from a factory.
"It was horrible," said Miss Elsie Wilson, master of the hunt. "The fox obviously knew his way across the tar, and the hounds were following so fast they didn't realize what they were running into."
It took four hours to clean the worst of the tar off the hounds, and frequent renewals of their straw for a week after to restore them to something like their old selves.
Brer Fox laughed and laughed.
MOUNTED HORSEPOWER
A good police car, like a good sports car, should be agile in traffic and faster than anything else on the road. In recognition of this principle, Europe has begun to develop a new law enforcement breed, the sports-car police.
In Germany, for instance, the routine highway patrol car still is the little Volkswagen but, for more sophisticated game that the VW could not hope to catch, there is now the sleek, fleet Porsche 356, with a top speed of 113 mph. The Porsche also casts its shadow of justice over the roads of Holland, Belgium and Finland.
The world's fastest police car is a lone Ferrari 3000 belonging to the Questura (public security) police of Rome. A 150-mph ace in the hole, it is considered too precious for ordinary use and is reserved for emergencies at night, when there is less traffic and less chance that it might be scratched or have a fender crumpled. Common daytime duty is assigned to the baby Fiat, which is handy but not hot. The open road in Italy is wide open, with practically no speed limits, and there the Alfa Romeos run rampant, chased, when necessary, by 120-mph police in Alfa Romeos. In such situations it pretty much depends on who runs out of gas first.
On the country lanes of England, where the Stirling Mosses grow, policemen have a happier lot than most, driving the 125-mph Jaguar 3.8 Mark 2 or a Daimler SP. But Colin Chapman, whose Lotus-Climax won the Grand Prix Championship in 1963, and whose sports car, the Lotus Elan S2, is unbeaten, has now created an Elan Police Special, with large-throat carburetors and special camshafts. It can reach 50 mph in seven seconds and a top of 117 mph in about 18 seconds. An open two-seater, only 3 feet 9½ inches high, it nevertheless can accommodate two large bobbies and their radio. With superlative road-holding ability, it corners at speed and can make a U turn in 30 feet. It can even do 36 mph in reverse. James Bond would love it.
The first British company to cater to cops was Ford, with its special 100-mph Zephyr. Ford also has produced a 90-mph Cortina GT station wagon for Kenya's rough-riding police.
France is somewhat behind in the race. The flics ride to work on bicycles, then putter from one traffic jam to the next in tiny Renaults. In emergencies they dash off at 80 mph in the good old Peugeot 403, which is a fine, sound automobile but never would cause a fleeing crook to exclaim "Diable! We arc undone!"
ILLUSTRATION
THEY SAID IT
•The Rev. Paul L. O'Connor, S.J., Xavier University president, endorsing a new Catholic Athletic Conference proposed by Xavier Athletic Director Jim McCafferty: "It might even encourage some schools that have abandoned football to return to the paths of righteousness and once again lead a full life.'
•Henry Iba, Oklahoma State basketball coach, told that his team had made 19 errors against Kansas in the game that clinched the Big Eight title for State: "It could well have been 20—they almost dropped me carrying me off the court after the game."
